Performances
RD Popularity Index
RD Growth Index
Revenue & Burn
Protocol income
$56.64MBuyback funds
$52.44MBurn funds
--Buyback ratio
92.6%Protocol funds over time
Monthly amounts & ratios
| Period | Protocol income | Buyback funds | Burn funds | Buyback ratio |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 2026 | $56.64M | $52.44M | -- | 92.6% |
Comparison
Follow Updates
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People
About Papertrade
Papertrade is a perpetual contract exchange deployed on the Hyperliquid chain. Its core mechanism is that users directly bet against a public LP pool, with the platform reading Hyperliquid's order book prices as quotes, but orders do not enter a matching system. Trades have no fees, no slippage, and no funding rates. When users profit, payments come from the LP pool; when they lose, losses are injected into the pool. The LP pool does not accept external deposits; its only source of funds is user losses. The platform token PAPER is minted based on user losses according to a curve: when the LP pool balance is below $2 million, each $1 loss mints 100 PAPER, and the minting rate decays after that. Staking PAPER earns a share of the platform's fee income and the excess portion of the LP pool above $5 million. Essentially, this model converts trading losses into token distribution, forming a closed loop where "losers get shares, winners take losers' money." The market pain point is that traditional perpetual contracts have funding rates, slippage, and counterparty risk. Papertrade attempts to attract users with zero fees and zero slippage, but the LP pool may become insolvent if losses cannot cover profits, causing winners to face delayed withdrawals. In the past six months (March to September 2026), the project sparked community discussion after its launch, but specific trading volume and user data have not been publicly disclosed. Additionally, the mechanism heavily depends on HyperEVM's performance and can be easily replicated on other high-performance chains, posing competitive risks.
Papertrade officially announced the launch of a zero-fee perpetual DEX on HyperEVM on May 14, 2026, offering up to 1000x leverage, zero trading fees, zero slippage, and zero funding rates, sparking widespread debate in the crypto community. The protocol does not use an order book directly; instead, it reads Hyperliquid's BBO mid price as an oracle and creates synthetic positions against the protocol's own LP pool.
On May 17, the project announced a limited-time beta version. Its core innovation is the "Martingaler Mechanism": the LP starts from zero, users cannot deposit directly, and it grows only through trader losses, liquidations, and haircuts on profitable trades. The PAPER token has zero pre-mine, zero team allocation, and no VC allocation; it is minted solely when traders lose, creating a unique "lose money, earn tokens" flywheel where stakers earn USDC dividends from trader losses.
Blockworks researchers simulated every BTC and ETH trade closed on Hyperliquid over the past 365 days, assuming 1% volume capture. The results showed the LP steadily growing despite roughly balanced wins and losses, driven by the haircut on winning trades, validating the model's feasibility. Early staking yields were exceptionally high before gradually normalizing. The project is widely regarded as one of the most creative market structure experiments in crypto.
Over the past six months, PaperTrade launched its mainnet on HyperEVM (May 2026), introducing a zero-fee synthetic perpetual venue with up to 1000x leverage, using Hyperliquid's BBO mid-price for settlement and no gas costs for traders. It also activated the PAPER token fair launch, minted only when traders incur losses, with stakers receiving protocol revenue. Independent research by Sumcap simulated 608 scenarios using 3.6M Hyperliquid trades, finding 100% solvency, with LP cap reached in as little as five days. Official roadmap details remain scarce; the project highlights expanding asset coverage and refining tokenomics, while no specific future phases have been published beyond the current mechanism design.
Colin Hong (@izebel_eth) is the founder of Papertrade. He previously worked as a quantitative research analyst in automated market making at Morgan Stanley/Millennium and is currently a venture partner at Standard Crypto. Papertrade.xyz originated from a tweet by jez in 2026 and was launched by Colin Hong and @blurr. The public identity and background of @blurr have not been disclosed. No reliable public information is available for other core executives.